The #Righteous during World War Two
Egyptan Dr. Mohammed Helmy saved a Jewish family in Berlin from death in the Holocaust 1/n Mohamed Helmy was an Egyptian doctor who lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. He was honoured by Israel's Yad Vashem
2/n Holocaust memorial as "Righteous Among the Nations" – the highest honor given to a non-Jew for risking great personal dangers to rescue Jews from the Nazis' gas chambers.
Helmy was born in 1901 in Khartoum, in what was then Egypt and is now Sudan, to an Egyptian father and a
3/n German mother. He came to Berlin in 1922 to study medicine and worked as a urologist until 1938, when Germany banned him from the public health system because he was not considered Aryan, said Martina Voigt, the German historian, who conducted research on Helmy.
4/n When the Nazis began deporting Jews, he hid 21-year-old Anna Boros, a family friend, at a cabin on the outskirts of the city, and provided her relatives with medical care. After Boros' relatives admitted to Nazi interrogators that he was hiding her, he arranged for her
5/n to hide at an acquaintance's house before authorities could inspect the cabin. The four family members survived the war and immigrated to the U.S. Letters expressing their gratitude to their rescuer were uncovered in the Berlin archives, and were submitted to Yad Vashem
6/n After the war, Helmy picked up his work as a physician again and married Emmi. The couple had been unable to marry during the Nazi era because of the race laws in place. Helmy stayed in West Berlin where he worked as a doctor until his death in 1982.
7/7 Mohamed Helmy and his wife Emmi Helmy (right) in Berlin during a visit of Anna Boros (second from left) and her daughter Carla in 1969.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
His name was Georges Blind, but the world knows him as "The Smiling Shot" (Le fusillé souriant) 1/n It took until the 1980s to give a name to this man, hitherto unknown, smiling at his firing squad in an exceptional photograph published for the first time in May 1945.
2/n This historic photograph has been subject of extensive research, in particular by Christophe Grudler, who for 12 years gathered all the pieces necessary to retrace the history of one of the most famous photos in the world.
The author of this historic photo is still unknown
3/n today. All we know is that it was taken between October 15 & 23, 1944 in Belfort. Contrary to common belief, Georges Blind, a fireman, did not die by the guns of the Germans. The execution was staged in an attempt to make him betray his comrades, which he never did.
Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a particularly brutal atrocity during World War II. The entire village was destroyed and its inhabitants killed by German troops on June 10, 1944, exactly two years after a
similar fate had befallen the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice.
In reprisal for Resistance attacks, an SS detachment of 200 men routed all 652 inhabitants from their homes and into the village square. A search for hidden explosives and an identity check were announced, and the
people were herded off—the men into barns and the women and children into the church. The troops then barred the doors of the barns and the church, and with dynamite and incendiary devices they set fire to the entire village. Anyoe not suffocated or burned to death was killed by
1/n Anna Hess, letter about an upcoming deportation to Theresienstadt (June 8, 1943)
"My dear Marthchen!
In the greatest hurry I would like to inform you that today we are setting off after all on the long-planned journey, and I am glad that it is now so far and that one can get
2/n out of the eternal anxiety whether one would travel or not. When the long journey is over, everything will be fine, and the hope that I will maybe meet
Rudolf and Lieschen again [illegible material], gives me the courage and strength to overcome everything.
What must be,
3/3 must be and what so many can do, I want to be able to do, too. So for my sake, do not worry at all.
The greatest pain and deprivation is that we do not
hear from each other for such a long time but I do not let go of the hope that we will still meet again."
#OTD 9 June 1944 LIDICE was razed to the ground 1/n After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans unleashed a severe retaliation. Hitler lashed out by murdering thousands of Jews. He wanted to kill 10,000 Czech political prisoners, but high-ranking Nazi
2/n Heinrich Himmler convinced him that they needed Czechs to keep the Protectorate industrially productive. Still, more than 13,000 were arrested, and 5,000 were murdered in reprisals.
The bodies of the men and boys over age 16 of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, murdered by the Nazis.
3/n Due to false information, the Nazis thought the assassins were hiding in Lidice, a village near Prague, and also found a radioresistance transmitter in Ležáky. The Germans took revenge on Lidice by killing all 199 men in the town, arresting the 195 women and sending them
2/n Of the estimated 71,600 Jews who lived in Greece at the time of the 1941 Nazi invasion, at least 58,885 perished in the Holocaust. Most Jews lived in Thessaloniki, formerly known as Salonika, which had been the religious and cultural hub for Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain
3/n in 1492. In February 1943, the Jews of Thessaloniki were given less than a month to move into a ghetto established in the Baron Hirsch quarter, and almost all their property was confiscated. Deportations began in March, and by August, almost all had been deported and murdered
1/n June 8, 1993: Rene Bousquet, who led the police during the Vichy regime and was responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to German concentration camps during World War II, was assassinated in his Paris apartment
2/n Bousquet's address in Paris was well known because demonstrators placed a plaque in front of his apartment building to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the killings at Vel d'Hiv, a stadium where 4,000 Jews were held before being deported on July 16th and 17th in 1942.
3/n They were among the nearly 13,000 Jews arrested by Paris police on those two days in the biggest single roundup carried out during the war. Nearly all were to die in German concentration camps.
As secretary general of the Vichy police in the Vichy Interior Ministry between